The current trend in CPU architecture is to increase the number of cores per CPU. Such an increase in cores differs from past trends in which the main focus was on increasing CPU clock speed because decreasing clock speed can act to reduce power consumption.
Using multi-core CPUs and the accompanying hardware, execution times of long running processes which are executed mainly using single threads will become even longer. This can have a negative impact because for batch processes which utilize only one or a small number of threads and which are not effectively parallelized (or parallelizable). For example, for certain operations, parallelization is not possible, or difficult to achieve. In most convention software architectures, automated parallelization of tasks by the compiled and other infrastructure is limited. Thus, parallelization is not broadly available, but rather, only available for those tasks where the developer of the underlying software has explicitly design same for parallelization. As a result, all other long running tasks will experience an increasing execution runtime.